Conversations in the car

Every day on the way home from school I have about three minutes to get all the school goss out of Boo before he descends into a whirl of pent up ticks and whirs of stims that he has been valiantly holding in all day.

On Friday we jumped in the car after his day at the specialist school and I asked him about his day.

‘Today I had numeracy and we did *insert something I can’t even remember here that will become evident in a second* and then in Sex Ed we talked about vibrations. NO, VIBRATORS!’

OMG – things have definitely changed from when I went to school !!!! No wonder you can’t remember what you had for dinner – I’m really glad you managed to remember where you lived and make it all the way home in one piece.
xox

Is it wrong that I want to know more? My 15-year-old came home the other day with the news that all meat is carcinogenic. Because apparently cows, pigs, lambs etc are fed food containing cancer-causing substances which can make us sick. As an off-on veggie for years (and the kids gave up too when they saw piggies going to market but liked bacon too much), I was intrigued, but I’m not sure that is true. He insists it is. I wonder if the whole class will now be going veggie, as he has insisted on vegetarian food the last few nights.

That hit the science news about 2 months ago. The WHO decided that bacon is likely to be carcinogenic (I can’t remember their exact phrasing, but it was step up from what it was before). New Scientist magazine covered it so it would be in their archive. Red meat is constantly demonised.

I compromise by limiting the amount of bacon consumed, and trying to have one vego meal per week.

Thanks for that. I respect teachers and come from a long line of them but I do wish if they tell kids these things they would warn us with the info. Honestly, I know practically everything causes cancer these days and it also led to an interesting convo about how I can’t give blood because I lived in England when Mad Cow happened, even though I was veggie, and how relatives and friends can’t give blood because they are gay (how wrong is that?) We have very few meat meals and I only started eating meat again because of the kids and extended family. Funnily enough, my son is the most veggie-friendly of our family, so that’s easy, and living in the country we can source lovingly raised and humanely killed meat if that is what they want. (They still have butchers who come to your property and humanely kill and divide up animals between families). It’s bit close to home for me and I still can’t drink full-cream milk because we had our own cows, who were treated with so much love by the way. Cancer-scared son still loves bacon though. Meat-loving daughter cooks the meat. As for sex – my kids still don’t want to go there. But they certainly know all the technical stuff. Perhaps that is what puts them off?

My son (15.5, year 10) was watching a doc in his health class a few weeks ago on meth amphetamine addiction, with people clearly injecting themselves on screen. My daughter (13, year 8) came home yesterday telling me that her health teacher had been telling them about medications in their class and used the contraceptive pill as an example.

When I was in year 12 in 1987 (height of the AIDS epidemic) the school had to get special permission from all parents to allow Family Planning to come in and give us one two hour session on how to prevent AIDS. We put condoms on bananas for practice. My son was taught that in his health class in year 8.